


One day

by azure7539



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen or Pre-Slash, Post-War, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-20
Updated: 2014-10-20
Packaged: 2018-02-21 21:26:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2483012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azure7539/pseuds/azure7539
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dawn was when warmth came.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One day

**Author's Note:**

> First fic ever written in second person. Unbeta-ed, per usual, so all errors are mine.
> 
> I don't know how this came to be really, it just popped into my head out of the blue.
> 
> Still looking for a beta though, if anyone is interested, contact me!
> 
> Anyway, enjoy~

**ONE DAY**

* * *

 

Light had always been dreadful.

Light meant facing another day of pain and torment. Light meant working as hard as you could, exerting all your efforts out there only to be whipped on the back ruthlessly accompanied with yells of fouls words, with boots kicked to the stomach and back that just knocked the air out of your lungs.

You gasped and fell down to the ground harshly, the sharp rocks dug into your flesh, breaking your skin and drawing blood.

On a good day, they would be howling with laughter, then you would be allowed at least some times to get back onto your hands and knees, crawling away from them as quickly as you dared to. _“Never, and I mean never, walk in front of another living soul. Do you understand?!”_

You had defiantly said no enough times to remember just exactly how many rings there were on those hands that slapped you senseless until your ears rang, and you had somehow bitten your tongue accidentally under the force of each strike.

On a bad day, they would come down upon you, fingers in your hair (the main reason why they refused to just shave it away), yanking so hard you could feel and hear the strands getting uprooted from your scalp. _“What good are you if you can’t even do something as simple as that?!”_ then there would be snickers somewhere in the background, suggesting heinous punishments and utter humiliation.

At first, you would snarl and sneer and thrash (but you couldn’t anymore, no energy left to spare... they only fed you enough to keep your body moving and functioning) until, one day, someone perked up ever so casually and said, _“how about if we break his fingers?”_   the voice was so sickening sweet that made you almost want to throw up your meager meal. _“He is a Potions Master after all, and Potioneers, Master or not, value their hands a lot should they want to even brew a decent batch.”_

Now?

Now, you couldn’t even remember why you attempted to escape all those other times. There was no way out.

Now, you crawled on the ground, trying to keep your breathing as quiet as you could, trying to keep your presence as small as possible because now... now that you had learnt your place, you didn’t want to make anymore of those previous mistakes. Not that you were naïve enough to think that they wouldn’t punish you for doing nothing wrong. The reality now was far more brutal, now they punished you on a whim, for their own amusement and entertainment (hadn't it always been so?). Now they no longer needed a reason to punish you. That was even worse than before. But you had to obey, obey and didn’t make it any harder on yourself.

Because you had already forgotten how to fight back. You had forgotten why you had to fight back.

Why fight back when there was, after all, no way out?

-

There was a scream sitting at the base of your throat, itching to be let out. But you couldn’t.

You couldn’t make a sound.

-

Darkness had always been conflicted.

Darkness was that shred of peace that Light never provided. Peace from the outside world because they all had fallen into slumber. But not peace from your own mind.

Darkness was that interval of false calm in which the orders, the yelling and shouting and beating stopped coming from out there and came from in here, inside your mind, instead. Orders-yells-shouts-screams-curses-blood-tears-begs-orders-yells-shouts-... a chain that swirled relentlessly and haunted your head.

You sat there curled up under the battered and torn towel that had been thrown at you since you first arrived to be both your blanket and pillow, feeling like you were balancing on a line of swaying rope with no net underneath to catch you should you ever lose your footing and fall (fall,fall,fall) to the bottomless pit below.

The cold was seeping into your skin, flesh and bones, and you sat there shaking, pulling that towel around your shoulders, tugging your legs closer and closer to your body. You sat there where, from that rectangular opening up high on the wall-- just small enough that you couldn’t fit through and high enough so that it would just be out of your reach _[why would you need to fit through it? Why should you need it to be in your reach anyway?]_ , the silver blue moon beams would pour into this empty black cell (moon beams were good, moon beams didn’t hurt).

On a good day, you could see a couple of stars twinkling from far away. Or was that just your imagination?

On a not so good day, you could only make out a thin veil of white mist that covered up everything. No stars and barely no moon beams at all.

But either way, you would still reach out your right hand at that opening, crooked fingers quivering in the air, pretending as though you were there, so close... so close to something you didn’t quite recall any longer.

Back then, you would bristle with anger, resentment and humiliation whenever night fell. You would persistently ask yourself question after question. What happened? It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. When did it happen? Where? How? Why? Why... Why did this happen?

Why you?

But gradually, the despair, hopelessness and pain proved to be too overwhelming, too encompassing to bear, and you belatedly realized how pointless those questions were. There was no answer to them, there would never be. Then you grew tired, tired of thinking, tired of feeling, tired of fighting. You just wanted to lie down and sleep, sleep without nightmares, without those sinister shadows that kept dancing behind your closed eyelids.

Slowly, you became numb and unresponsive, dull and lifeless.

Hungry. Sore. Exhausted. Cold. There was no pride left to fuel the fire of your soul. No nothing. Blank.

And as your side touched the freezing floor below (puffs of white fog escaped your dried lips and nostrils as you breathed), you admitted to yourself one thing that had been almost a constant thought playing back and forth: you were alone.

Alone and lonely.

-

That scream remained right there, right where it had always been, perching at the base of your throat, itching to be let out. But you couldn’t set it free.

You still couldn’t make a sound.

-

One day, dawn was when warmth came.

There was a sound of something that woke you up. Something loud from far away. Your eyes opened and nothing happened, and you just knew that your senses must be tricking you (it would not be the fist time they did anyway).

It would be an early start that day then, you decided, lying still and waiting for the familiar sound of boots strolling your way with the piercing clinking of the twirling metal key chain.

But that didn’t come. Instead, there was this loud bang that startled you, snapping you out of the daze left by those fitful sleeps as your heart began to race, feeling like it would leap out of the cavity in your chest at any given moment. There was an established routine, and even when you followed that routine, it still didn’t guarantee that you would be free from harm and torture. And now... now that the routine was broken... you could only expect the worst.

Struggling to get up (your joints and muscles were always stiff first thing in the morning), loud and urgent footsteps bouncing in the hallway outside were only making it that much harder for you to maneuver properly, you knew it would be in your best interest to present a pleasing sight to greet them as they came in, saving yourself from as much pain as possible later on.

The door swung open forcefully, metal scraping on hard stone as you could hardly contain the never ceasing tremors that kept crashing into your body in torrential waves. But you kept your position still, kneeling all on four with your forehead flat against the floor, waiting with bated breath as to what might come next.

Silence followed, and your stomach clenched painfully with burning fear and confusion and dread as you continued to wait and wait and wait (you hated waiting, you really did) for something to happen. Something. Anything.

“Snape?” and something dropped down in front of you.

The air was stuck on its trip down to your lungs. That... That was your name. And you couldn’t remember the last time it had been spoken aloud like this. _“You don’t bloody deserve a name, traitor!”_

Slowly, cautiously, you lifted your face up that bit higher to sneak a peek at the source of that voice, the voice that had called out your name for the first time in ages.

Messy jet black hair and striking green eyes filled up your vision, similar to those of the boy’s you had seen in your dreams from time to time (no, not those nightmares, no... The neutral ones that blessedly brought no fear, no pain. Just there like random pieces of memories)... but this was no boy you were peering at... It was a man, a man with a forlorn expression gracing his features as if he was drown in agony and couldn’t escape also. A sad and tearful man.

You knew this man, you thought, his name weighing heavy at the tip of your tongue. A figure from the distant past, a life that you could no longer a part of.

Potter.

Harry Potter.

And you caught it. Behind him, behind this Harry Potter, just beyond the threshold of that metal door that kept you locked up in here, inside this prison of pain.suffering.despair.cold.loneliness, lay the man that threw you in here and opened it for you to come out every day (every single day) to face the light, face the downpour of punishments. Dead.

For a moment there, no thoughts registered in your head, you couldn’t process what was unfolding here.

But then you dazedly looked back at the man, the man that was edging closer and closer to you as he finally raised his arms (you flinched, mind conditioned to think there only existed pain in the world for you).

Nothing came though. No strike. No slap. No pain. There was only this engulfing warmth as those arms wrapped themselves around your body, pulling you in as you heard his broken voice whispering nonstop like a mantra that he was sorry, so sorry. Sorry.Sorry.Sorry.

Everything clicked. Suddenly, the itch in your throat was back.

And you screamed.

* * *

_End~_

 


End file.
